Garret Keizer - Help: The Original Human Dilemma

Im very proud that I went to Spain because I feel like I have done something in this world to help people. And thats what Im here for. Thats what we all are here for.

Salaria Kea OReilly
Nurse in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

Help, he said, is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it badly.

So it is, he said, using an old homiletic transition, that we can seldom help anybody.

Norman Maclean , A River Runs Through It

The Dark Wood

The Dubious Samaritan

The Dream We No Longer Admit

Those Who Have Hands

The Domestic Samaritan

The Descent Into Hell

A Better Plan Than This

T he trooper was calling long-distance from Arizona to find out what I knew about Kathy B. besides her name, the Christian half of which happened to be the same as my wifes. I registered the similarity as soon as he said the words: Kathy is dead . I hated the sound of that, though I had heard something like it once before. Years ago, when Kathy B. was living nearby and slowly draining the reservoirs of my goodwill, she had called the office at the school where I taught and asked that I be paged because of an emergency.

Who is this? the secretary had demanded.

Kathy.

But it had not been my Kathy, and it had not been an emergency, though I might well have had an accident or a heart attack as I dashed out of my classroom and down the crowded hall to the phone.

I told the trooper I did not know much. There was a couple over in Island Pond with whom Kathy had sometimes stayed during her sojourns in northeastern Vermont; the trooper said he had already found their names after searching Kathys campsite. It was they who had recommended that he call me. Yes, I was a minister, I verified, but only part-time, and I had never really been her minister. I had found her sitting on the church lawn one Sunday morning (gaunt and toothless, at first glance neither male nor female but with an ascetics preternatural strength in her grip and in her stride) and had tried to help her for a few months thereafter. In fact, I was one of those who had helped her arrange the trip to Arizona. She had seldom attended my church.

I just tried to help, I said.

If the trooper was thinking what I was thinking, that apparently my help had not been enough, his voice did not betray him. In fact, he sounded ready to credit me with more grief than I could feel when he told me that Kathy B. had taken her own life.

Two lines from two songs keep playing in my head these days, though it has been a while since either was a regular on my stereo. The one is from the folksinger Joni Mitchell, and it goes: If you cant find your goodness cause youve lost your heart. The other, from an Australian group called Paul Kelly and the Messengers, is much like it. I lost my tenderness, Kelly says. Then he adds, I took bad care of this.

It would make a neat transition to say me too, but the truth is that I have not lost my heart or my tenderness as nearly as I can tell and so far as people tell me. Not yet. I also have not lost my hair or any of my teeth, which another singer, James Brown, claims are the main things a man needs to hang on to. (I assume that is especially true if the man is James Brown.) But I have reached that age when things do start to fall off or out of a person: hair, teeth, muscle tone, and perhaps some of the altruistic energy of youth.

A quip often attributed to Winston Churchill asserts that a man who isnt a socialist when hes young has no heart, and a man who isnt a conservative when hes old has no brains. I would sooner lose my hair than allow myself to become a conservative (or brainless)but I am extraordinarily fond of that quote, and I take it there must be a good reason. It may be the same reason I keep imagining the Mitchell line and the Kelly line playing over and over like a dire musical omenand the same reason too that I heard the troopers announcement with a sense of mounting resistance. I am too old, I said to myself, to be surprised by this news and too old to feel implicated by it. I am also too old to feel guilty for not feeling sadder about it. I did what I could to help her. I saw this coming.

And yet I was apparently not too old to wish, and to say that I wishedin regard to the troopers search for any next of kinthat I could be of more help. And even though Kathy B. was dead now, I still prayed that God would help her.

Help is what this book is about. You will notice that I am also at the age when one has little patience for a long prelude. Along with that impatience comes a sense, hitherto rare in my life, of limited possibilities. At twenty-five, we feel that we will always be able to get to certain things at some later date; when we are fifty even a bookcase starts to look like a graveyard. If I start right now, and read twenty-five pages every day . But of course we do not start right now, and even if we did, we would be unlikely to keep the resolution. We know more vividly than ever before that we are going to have to make deliberate, fatal choices about which books we are going to read and, in a case like mine, which we will try to write.

For various reasons that will become clearer as we go on, I have decided that one of the things I want most to read and write about is what it means to help someoneand what it means not to help someone. They go together, of course, because, as most people discover sooner or later, you can wind up not helping even when you wanted to help and vice versa. Let Kathy B. stand as my Exhibit A.

I should say at the outset that I am not writing primarily about altruism. I am not exactly sure what altruism is, and I suppose I need not be overly ashamed of my ignorance if no less an authority than the psychiatrist Anna Freud wondered if such a thing as pure altruism even existed. Ill go Anna one better and wonder if pure altruism would be such a good thing if it did. I can imagine God as a pure altruist, but I have trouble imagining a human being purified of all self-serving without also imagining a human being who thought he or she was God.

I used to believe, in that way we have of conjuring bogus etymologies from the English sounds of foreign roots, that altruism meant all truethat is, the belief that all of us are true, none better than the other. I happen to like that meaning better than the actual derivation from the French alter , for other. Altruism is defined as a concern for others, which sounds like the basis of all virtue though it has been the pretext for much sin, for there is a risk of seeing the other as a little too other, as the lesser object in what the theologian Martin Buber spoke of (in his book I and Thou ) as an I-It relationship.

The word help strikes me as belonging more to an I-Thou relationship (assuming I have grasped Buber any better than I have grasped altruism) because the other cannot remain detached from the evaluation of my acts and because help is always an action. The other gets to weigh in on whether I was a help and on how much help I was. I sometimes think of an altruist as a sort of ethical Don Juan, racking up his conquests, whereas a helper partners up with someone who gets to have a say in what they call their offspring, if they manage to have any.

To put the matter more succinctly, Kathy B.s suicide is powerless to impugn the altruism of anything I did on her behalf. But it does have the power to raise the question of whether or not I helped her. While she lived, so did she. Only a Thou can turn around and ask you a question like that.